Compound Eye Shaped
Flexible Organic Photo Sensor
with a Tunable Visual Field


 

This paper reports on a compound-eye-shaped flexible organic photo sensor and its characteristics of tunable visual field. The device consists of a polymer microlens array and organic photo sensors using pentacene-based organic fielde-effect transistors (OFET) on a flexible substrate.. Angular visual field is tunable just by bending the substrate to change the curvature radius of the device. In this method we can get photo sensors with various visual field with a sensor of the same design. This can be realized because of the recent development in polymer MEMS and OFETs. Many of the conventional studies on organic semiconductors are limited only to the basic electric characteristics. The electric characteristics of organic semiconductors are not so good as silicon semiconductors. Organic semiconductors need high voltage to work and switching ratio is much slower than that of silicon. Organic semiconductors have, however, advantage of the flexiblity. Although some studies suggest new process for flexible OFET, the application of flexible OFETs is few. The objective of our study is to apply the flexibility of OFETs to a new device such as wearable sensing devices which cannot be achieved by conventional silicon rigid semiconductors.

References :
Hiroshi Saito, Kazunori Hoshino, Kiyoshi Matsumoto, Isao Shimoyama, “Compound Eye Shaped Flexible Organic Image Sensor with a Tunable Visual Field,” 18th IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS '05), pp. 96-99, Miami, Fulorida, USA, January 30-February 3, 2005. [Proceedings]